18 March 2015

In this final part of our “Basics” course, we have looked at democracy,
armed struggle, and popular unity-in-action, in terms of various countries of
the world. Now we look again at South Africa, in the context of National
Democratic Revolution. The NDR is not a South African invention. It is a
worldwide phenomenon. But it has generated a specifically South African
literature.

Like many political
documents, this pamphlet takes shape around a polemical response to
contemporary opponents who may no longer be well-remembered (in this case it
was the particular “workerists” and compromisers of the time that Slovo
mentions on the first page of the document).

But as with the polemics of
Marx, Engels and Lenin, in the course of the argument against otherwise
long-forgotten foes, Slovo was obliged to set up a fully concrete, rounded
assessment of the meaning of the NDR, which still remains today as the best
single and definitive text on this matter in South Africa.

Slovo quickly establishes the
class-alliance basis of the NDR and quotes Lenin saying that: “the
advanced class ... should fight with… energy and enthusiasm for the cause of
the whole people, at the head of the whole people”. This advanced
class is the working class. Slovo goes on to write of the continuity of the NDR
and of the institutional organisation that is the bricks-and-mortar of
nation-building.

Slovo’s is a long document
but it has many possibilities as the basis for a discussion, and that is always
our purpose: dialogue.

This instalment ends the
“Basics” course.

·The above is to
introduce the original reading-text:The South African
Working Class and the NDR, 1988, Slovo, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.